Daring to believe

[Times photos: Scott Keeler] Mike Hargrave talks to fifth-graders at San Jose Elementary School in Dunedin during a DARE graduation ceremony. Hargrave has worked the past 15 years as a prevention specialist for the Safe and Drug Free Schools program in Pinellas County.

By DAVE SCHEIBER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 11, 2002

Critics question whether the DARE antidrug program has lasting effects, but one of its most popular speakers in Pinellas County says kids need its help.

DUNEDIN -- The school cafeteria is jammed with fifth-graders just after 9 a.m. on a recent Tuesday. Live, from San Jose Elementary, it's . . . some tall dude with a goofy Jim Carrey grin, a Bugs Bunny tie and a standup comic patter that feels more like a night at the Improv than a day in the lunch room.

"Good morning ladies and jelly beans," he begins in a cartoonish announcer voice.

"It's so nice to be with you big-time fifth-graders here at San Joe-zay Element-a-rary School in DUNE-din, Florida," Nervous giggles fill the air. You can almost hear the kids wondering: Okay, who is this guy and what's he doing in our cafeteria?

He slides into a monologue about life as big, bad fifth-graders who find they're not such hot stuff in sixth grade.

"Next year," he intones in a hush, like Rod Serling introducing a Twilight Zone episode, "you're moving into the Land of the Giants.

"Right now, everybody around here adores you. But next year, you're going to be looking up at everybody else, and you'll be walking down the hallway like this" -- he cranes his neck toward the ceiling and slips into Jim Varney's Ernest drawl -- "Dear Gooood, please don't allow that eighth-grader to step on the top of ma heaaad."

The place is howling. Soon, he's warning his audience to resist the temptations that may await, leading them in exaggerated, revivallike refrains of "I have da pow-ah! I have da pow-ah!"

Another graduating class from the national program known as DARE -- Drug Abuse Resistance Education -- has experienced the evangelism of Mike Hargrave.

Mike Hargrave holds a basketball as he tells students the story of Len Bias, a University of Maryland basketball star who died from a cocaine overdose.

Though he does not work for DARE, Hargrave is by far the most requested speaker in Pinellas at the program's fifth-grade graduations, taking place through May around the nation.

The son of a minister and now a minister himself at a small church he and his wife opened in Seminole, Hargrave has a knack for connecting with a crowd. He's a showman who can talk the language of kids, using an arsenal of jokes and silly faces to set up his serious message.

"I can tell you this, when it comes to my getting speakers for my graduations, I go for Mike first -- if he can't do it, then I try for somebody else," says DARE Officer Ken Stevens of the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, Florida DARE secretary.

But for all Hargrave's talent and dedication, and the efforts of countless law enforcement instructors, a question lingers: Does DARE work?

The program, started in 1983 by the Los Angeles Police Department, remains highly popular with participants, parents, teachers and police. Its 17-week curriculum is taught in three-quarters of the nation's school districts and more than 50 countries.

However, in recent years, DARE has been criticized as an ineffective deterrent with little or no long-term impact. While substance use is negligible in fifth grade, it jumps significantly in middle school and again in high school. Some of the fifth-graders who learned eight ways to say no to drugs don't remember them by the time they're sophomores.

Officer Ken Stevens works for the county’s DARE program and is Florida DARE secretary.

Detractors point to a lack of scientific data to track DARE's effectiveness. In 2000, for that reason, the U.S. Department of Education said funds made available to schools could no longer be spent on DARE. Salt Lake City dropped the program altogether last year.

"Its popularity persists despite numerous (analyses) that consistently show little or no deterrent effects on substance use," former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher wrote last year in Youth Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General.

DARE America has taken issue with the criticism, yet is conscious of it. The national office is redesigning the program with the help of a $13.7-million grant, but it will take some time before those efforts show results.

Hargrave knows from personal experience how hard it can be to keep young people away from drugs. One of his three sons, a 24-year-old Marine, recently spent two months in the brig. He was busted for cocaine use.

"If kids are lonely or hurt, they'll hurt the people they love most," he says. "They're going to try their own wings and may go in a direction you don't want them to go. You can educate, but you can't manipulate. All you can do is give them a set of values and hope and pray they'll make the right decisions.

"It's sad for him. Every day is going to be a struggle for him. But we love him."

So maybe Hargrave's message doesn't always get through. He keeps going anyway -- giving class presentations, speaking at some 40 DARE ceremonies a year, doing what he can. He is a man on a mission.

Now, at San Jose Elementary, Hargrave picks up a basketball and holds it in the palm of one hand. He is about to hold the audience in the palm of the other. Almost imperceptibly, he drops his voice into serious mode.

Fifth-grader Tate Gdovin, 11, gets a DARE medal from Officer Ken Stevens of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office at a recent graduation program.

He tells a story about a former University of Maryland basketball star he calls Lenny -- the late Len Bias, drafted No. 1 by the Boston Celtics.

He explains how Lenny was drug free until three "f-f-friends" -- he spits the word as if it tastes bad -- got him hooked on coke. Then he inserts a basketball needle into the ball, and lets out a little bit of air.

The only sound in the room is a whirring air conditioner.

"This needle has the power to inflate this basketball, but it also has the power to deflate the basketball; it depends on how it's used," he says.

He sticks in the needle to take a little more air out -- and hey, he proclaims, it still can fool you with a pretty decent bounce. But after several more needle insertions, Hargrave bounces the ball on the linoleum floor and it lands with a plop, not moving.

"Lenny continued to have seizures until he stopped -- breathing," he says quietly. "When the paramedics arrived, the best basketball player in America had lost something. He had lost his bounce.

"He had lost his life." No one says a word.

Hargrave went into the family business -- Christian ministry -- in the 1970s. He had churches in Illinois, Michigan and Indiana and did mission work in India and Thailand.

"But my priorities were all mixed up," he says. "I only focused on myself, and I paid a price": the breakup of his marriage.

He moved to Pinellas County in the early '80s and began working with children as a counselor for Operation PAR (Parental Awareness and Responsibility). He supervised drug-addicted teens in PAR's adolescent residential program and taught Pinellas County fourth-graders life skills.

In 1987, he was hired by a brand new program, Safe and Drug Free Schools, and was sent out to spread the word about drug abuse. He often relied on humor.

"Part of my style is from my minister background, but part of it is staying in touch with the child within," he says inside the program's complex at the Pinellas County School Board office in Largo.

Today, Hargrave, who works with four other prevention specialists, speaks to about 20,000 students a year in the county. He also mentors troubled students and takes classes at the University of South Florida.

"Mike is wonderful. He's great with adult audiences as well as with kids," says his boss of 15 years, Linda Jones. "He just has a real style, humor and creativity, and an ability to blend in a serious message."

Hargrave has written several teaching books incorporated by Jones' office, such as Bee Wize and Fish Tales, which has chapters on using good language ("Are the Swearing Hard of Herring?") and avoiding fights ("Holy Mackerel, It's Violent in the Reel World").

His most popular is The Tator Tales, which includes such spud characters as the IriTator, the SpecTator, the HesiTator, the FaciliTator and the SweetTator.

"It's a terrific lesson for teachers on the different kind of student behaviors that we encounter and how we can use classroom management skills with them," says program supervisor Jones.

So are kids getting Hargrave's message? Every two years, Safe and Drug Free Schools releases an extensive substance abuse report, based on surveys of Pinellas students in grades 5, 6, 8, 10 and 12, with about 35,000 students responding.

Among the findings in the 2000 report: Recent use of alcohol by fifth graders declined from 1994 to 2000 from 15.5 percent to 8.8. percent. The drop among sixth-graders was similar, from 22.5 percent to 16.1 percent. Marijuana use is almost non-existent in the fifth and sixth grades.

But when the kids get bigger, so does the problem.

Recent alcohol use, for instance, stands at 39.6 in eighth grade, 48.1 in 10th and 59.8 in 12th (though one encouraging trend to officials is a 4-point drop in eighth and 10th grades since 1994).

In the survey for recent use of marijuana, 18 percent of eighth-graders reported smoking it, followed by 26.4 percent of 10th graders and 29 percent of 12th-graders. Those numbers are basically the same as what was reported in 1994.

Nationally, the marijuana statistics are similar, according to studies conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

So how does Hargrave remain motivated to warn kids about drugs when there is little evidence many will remember a few years down the road?

"There is always the fact that kids are going to use, if they want to use -- even though they have these courses," he says.

"I'd hate to think what would happen if DARE weren't available. At least kids don't have any excuses. They're going in with their eyes open. If we don't give them the information, they have nothing. They have no foundation."

To the criticism that DARE cannot prove it is effective, Hargrave responds: "Prevention is a real difficult thing to measure. The only thing I can say is there are many more kids who don't use drugs than do. And that's the measure of our success."

"My word to the critics is, I'd rather have DARE there, and let the kids have that education, that model and support, than leave them defenseless."

At the University of Akron's Institute for Health and Social Policy, senior research associate Zili Sloboda is in charge of the project to revamp DARE's curriculum.

She was recruited by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropic health organization that is funding the DARE changes with a $13.7-million grant. The foundation liked DARE's delivery system -- reaching so many schools -- but felt the program could be improved.

After consulting with experts, Sloboda, formerly director of epidemiology and prevention research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, has changed the focus of the elementary school program. Instead of trying to prevent drug use in the long term, it will attempt to create positive attitudes and behavior. Kids will also talk about the abuse of tobacco, alcohol and inhalants, the substances most relevant to fifth-graders.

Sloboda has also zeroed in on middle school. The chief target of her new program will be seventh graders, with a ninth-grade followup. The reworked course, now in the testing phase, stresses group discussions and encourages students to come to conclusions by themselves. DARE officers will serve a slightly different role.

"The (current) DARE program has lots of material, and the officer is basically an instructor; we're making the officer a facilitator and a coach," says Sloboda. "Students are broken up into teams and are given problems they have to solve as a group."

DARE has had a middle school and high school program, but many law enforcement agencies have had the staff to teach only DARE's fifth-grade component. Sloboda's program shortens the DARE curriculum from 17 weeks to nine. She believes that the more compact program will allow law enforcement to send more officers into schools, at all three grade levels. The new programs could be in place in a year or so.

That may mean a lot more DARE graduations and antidrug evangelizing for Mike Hargrave.

"It's the same way with every teacher and every parent who lives for a chance to get a sparkle in a kid's eyes," he says. "It's the idea of "Look, I'm here for a particular purpose, and hopeful I'm going to connect.' You've got to believe in your mission, because kids need you. You can't be half-dead; otherwise they're just going to lose hope."

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